


Not Quite A Mirror

by isuilde



Category: Fate/Zero, Fate/stay night
Genre: Gen, UBW route, i think???
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-30
Updated: 2018-06-30
Packaged: 2019-05-31 02:12:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,524
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15109667
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/isuilde/pseuds/isuilde
Summary: Their relationship is not made of regrets. But they both are, and regrets are what tied them together.





	Not Quite A Mirror

**Author's Note:**

> A commissioned piece for a lovely long time reader of mine who wanted Waver and Rin bonding. Thank you so much for commissioning and helping me! ;^; Also thank you for letting me try out this prompt the way I like it. I really really hope you’d like this!

When he takes Tohsaka Rin under his wings, Reines drops by his cramped apartment under the pretense of having Gray serve her afternoon tea, but really is just there to tell him: “Wistfulness is not a good look on you.”

He doesn’t even look up from the book he’s perusing. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Don’t you?” Reines says, airily, but she still hasn’t sipped her tea despite her fingers has been daintily curling around the cup for the past fifteen minutes. “I’m suprised you didn’t tell me that you have no time to dwell on things like this. The denial is strong this time, isn’t it, dear Brother?”

He feels Gray’s eyes on him, attentive and observant, as he finally lifts the cup of tea she previously left on his desk to his lips. A small sigh escapes, dancing over the rim of the cup. “What I have no time for is mind games,” he tells Reines, sips on his tea.

It’s disgustingly lukewarm.

Reines laughs. He isn’t sure if it is because she knows she’s won this round, or if the face he makes at the tea is just that hilarious for her.

**——-o0o——-**

Most of the time, now, Waver Velvet no longer thinks of himself as Waver Velvet. He turns to the name of _Lord El Melloi_ (with a ready addition of _The Second_ hovering on his lips in case anyone forgets to include it), or simply _Professor_ , or _Master_ if it’s Gray. No one really calls him by the name he’s given anymore, nowadays, and sometimes he thinks he’d shelved it along with the carefully preserved piece of mantle that was his King’s and untold stories of being a lanky, embarrassing nineteen years old.

Along with a naive, clueless hope of seeing his King again, held closely for years even when he should have known better. 

The Grail did not choose him for the Fifth Fuyuki Holy Grail War, despite the ten years he’d spent stubbornly focusing on skills he’d thought he’d need. Instead, it chose younger bloods who inherit the legacy of the Fourth Grail War masters unknowingly, and closed with Tohsaka Rin emerging as a victor.

Tohsaka Rin, whose application to Clock Tower had arrived in his hand and he’d thought of being nineteen, all stubborn determination despite being small andpowerless against the world. Of having dreams and wishes and hopes that never came true in the end. He’d said yes, because she’s a fellow survivor, and he was intrigued, but mostly because Waver Velvet regrets. 

Tohsaka Rin clearly sees that, because the first time she comes into his office to introduce herself, she looks at him straight in the eye, her gaze steady in confidence born from knowledge of her current opponent, and says, “Hello, Professor Velvet.”

**——-o0o——-**

“I will not give you a single instruction,” he tells Tohsaka while he signs the documents she’d need to apply to other departments with _Lord El Melloi II_. “But I’ll send recommendation letters to other departments. By the way, do you know about Akihabara?”

Tohsaka raises an elegant eyebrow. “Not interested.”

“Nihonbashi, then.”

Her eyebrow rises higher.

He finishes signing the documents with an offended noise. “Fuck! You’re the worst Japanese!”

**——-o0o——-**

The boy Tohsaka brings along is a straight up main character trope who wants to be a hero. He can’t even laugh at how stupid it is, because he recognizes a large dream when he sees it, and knows that in the right capable hands, large dreams bring merits to those who chase after it.

After all, being able to direct people who chase them is part of why he’s good at what he does. Nevermind that it’s not what he wishes to be good at.

**——-o0o——-**

Tohsaka writes _Professor Velvet_ on all the papers and letters she addresses to him. It irritates him because it makes him see himself as Waver Velvet once again, makes him see how similar he was to Tohsaka as she struggles with politics of Clock Tower academia, young as she is. It irritates him because at the same time, the differences between them stretches as far as the end of the land and the end of the sky, because Tohsaka Rin is still Tohsaka Rin, and she has things and power he can only wish to have.

Number of magic circuits, for example. Talent as a Magus, for another.

She comes to him with the bare scratches of a tentative idea to scrape the Fuyuki Grail. “It is corrupted,” she insists, and for the first time, El Melloi II sees the jagged edges of regrets in her eyes. “There cannot be another Holy Grail War for the Fuyuki Grail. It has to be destroyed. 

He knows those regrets. He’s all too familiar about them. He knows that he can’t do anything for his own, but Tohsaka can, and it makes all the difference.

“You choose a hard path, Tohsaka,” he says as he takes her paper, noting five different flaws in her theory within the first three paragraph alone, but also six new possibilities to advance modern magic theories. The fact that she writes this without understanding the full implication of it speaks of how young she is, and how terrifying she could be. “This will take years.”

“Time that we have,” she replies in a wistful tone that spells out the rest of the words unsaid: _a rare miracle that we were not given._

Compared to two weeks, years is certainly an improvement. 

**——-o0o——-**

It takes years to build on Tohsaka’s scratch of theory intended to destroy the Fuyuki Grail. Before he knows it, it’s become a side project just as important as his own research focus, and at least sixty percent of the meat of this work is his own, because at some point Tohsaka has to go focus on her own thesis for the minerology department so she can actually graduate. 

They work together, pours over stacks and stacks of old magic scrolls and books and documents from every possible department of magic they can think of. He publishes a number of papers focusing om things branching out from their findings, listing Tohsaka’s name underneath his own. Hours of discussions in his office that follow them out to the local tavern where they’d drink the early part of the night, then going back to the Clock Tower and continue perusing the books until morning comes.

True to his words, though, he never instructs her on a single thing, nor does she ever ask him to. She’s a bright young woman, mind as sharp as the heels she walks in, as fast as her martial arts moves, as brilliant as the jewels she works with. All he does is nudge her to relevant direction, and she’ll go and figure out everything herself. It’s a simple kind of mentorship, one that, much to his astonishment, bleeds easily into camaraderie that turns her from Tohsaka into Rin, despite the unspoken emotional baggage that comes with spending time with her.

Perhaps his time with Gray has helped him deal with spending a lot of time in the vicinity of a young woman.

“Fuck this shit,” Rin swears, closing and dropping the old tome she is perusing onto the table with a loud thud. He spares her a glance, absently wondering if he’d sworn too much around her that it’s rubbing off on her. “It’s a goddamn lesser grail, surely destroying it shouldn’t have given us as many headaches as it has?! Corrupt as it is, it’s just a fucking replica; there has to be an easier way to destroy it without causing too much collateral damage—“

“Maybe we should look at it from a different perspective,” he interjects, placing the scroll in his hand back on the shelf. He can feel Rin’s frustration and anger souring the air, following the angry tap-tap-tap of her heels as she begins pcing around his office. “The connection to the Root—“ 

Rin groans loudly. “We’ve gone over this a thousand times, Professor, and we still haven’t found a way that works better than chipping at the Fuyuki Grail at a snail pace. Which would take us a thousand years, and I can’t—“ she loses her breath, her pacing halting abruptly, and she swears under her breath. “I need a fucking drink. Give me your most expensive bottle.”

He looks at her incredulously. “Are you expecting me to say yes, sure, and hand you my most expensive bottle?”

Rin strides over to his wine rack. “You don’t keep your most expensive bottles here anyway, don’t think I don’t know.”

She’s not wrong. It doesn’t mean he’s going to admit defeat. “Touch my stash and I’ll make you rewrite your entire chapter on Akasha.” He glances at where Rin is pulling out one of the wine bottles, and bristles. “Fuck, Rin! That one’s for when I have to entertain a Grand, hands off!”

“Treat yourself to the not-cheap ones, Professor Velvet,” Rin says, all smirks and taunts. “Life’s too short to keep all the expensive ones for people who manage to prevail in this dumb structure of association. I mean, look at it! All the mage politics and corruption, it’s rotten down to the core and you can see it in every single step of the ladder. Isn’t that why you never climbed higher?”

And just like that, something clicks. Just like that, his mind races, as he watches Rin fetch two frail-looking wine glasses, oblivious to the the absolute fact in her words: “Don’t you think it gets irritating, that no matter how far you go in this association, it seems that you’re discovering more and more corruption, and even though you’re trying to change it, you know nothing is going to change until you could take this entire structure by pieces and hammer at each of the problem—“

“Dismantle it,” he says abruptly, the word hanging fainy in the air. “Don’t destroy it. Dismantle it.”

Rin stops. Stares at him, wide-eyed, mouth falling open as enlightenment dawns, almost a mirror of his own.

It’s a flurry of papers and excited discussions afterwards, for days on end. When Gray opens the door to her Master’s office, what she finds is this: a half-asleep Rin draping a blanket over a sleeping El Melloi II, half-drowned in scrolls and papers, before dragging herself to collapse on the nearly invisible couch on top of the countless tomes and books.

**——-o0o——-**

“Must you go against the Mages Association every single time?” Reines complains, when she first finds out about the project, and proceeds to bicker with him for a good hour about it. She doesn’t tell him not to do it, though, and leaves his place with a tinkling laugh that tells him she finds everything more amusing than she should have.Gray, on the other hand, has a frown marring her face as she clears the table.

“You are bothered,” he notes. Gray fumbles with the empty cup she’s placing on the tray, and he mirrors her frown at that. “Gray.”

“Master,” she sounds hesitant, eyes hiding beneath bangs for a moment, and then the words come out in a rush. “But you wish to see him again.”

He closes his eyes, remembers her request all those years back. Remembers himself saying _I am not giving up_ , and then half-vowing, _I want to see Rider again. Once Reines lets me go, I’ll participate in the Fifth Grail War._ Remembers Gray, much younger, much simpler, _please take me with you, Master._

“I imagine she does, too,” he says, and lits a cigar because he can feel the regrets coming in tides, threatening to drown him if he so much as lets himself be nostalgic. “Whoever it is she lost. And yet she still wrote that paper. Came to me and insisted to destroy the Grail, because it’s corrupted. Because it’s the right thing to do.”

Rin doesn’t let the tide of regrets drown her. She swims against it instead; a display of courage to add to the list of things she has that he doesn’t.

**——-o0o——-**

They discuss everything there is about magic, the Root, the Holy Grail, the Wars. The politics they see and go through in Clock Tower. The people they surround them with.

But never the regrets. Never the personal stories carved into them when they find themselves survivors. Never the wishes and dreams and never, ever, the regrets. 

**——-o0o——-**

Ten years after the end of the Fifth War, they finally dismantle the Grail.

It’s almost anticlimactic, in the way Rin just motions for him to follow her into one of the local bars that are somehow still open, despite the chaos unfolding in Fuyuki for the past few weeks. “Come on, Professor,” she smirks, tossing one pigtail over her shoulder. “We earn a celebration.”

The bar is rather empty, except for two other patrons nursing their drinks on the corner, and a lone singer crooning a sad song into the microphone on the tiny stage on the furthest side. They both slide into the stools, Rin greeting the man behind the counter with a familiar smile, and soon enough, a wine glass and a bottle of Pomeral Petrus is waiting by his elbow, while Rin has a martini between her fingers.

He raises a eyebrow even as he pulls out a cigar. “Trying for sophisticated?”

Normally, Rin would have snorted at his jibe. Or snapped, if she’s in a particularly bad mood. Now, all she does is let out a half-bitter laugh as she swirls the drink in her hand, the lines of exhaustion and sadness deepening the corners of her eyes.

“Just a bit,” she raises her drink, watches the dim light reflected on the glass. “I don’t know. Maybe I just want to pretend that I’ve become someone who can stand his equal.”

She pauses, watches his glass slowly gets filled with red wine deeper than blood, and says, “Professor Velvet.”

His hand jerks. The wine almost splashes out of the glass. But the name, the way Rin says it—it’s enough for him to think of himself as Waver Velvet, all over again. No matter that he’s just dismantled a Holy fucking Grail, or that he has an entire fuming Mage Association after his ass.

Waver Velvet turns and meets Rin’s eyes, see the regrets behind them carved deep into a gaze of someone who is not quite a young woman. He wonders who it is the Archer she lost in the war, and what regrets came with it. Wonders if she’d been changed as much as he had, in the short span of two weeks, and if what marked them as survivors are the regrets and the scars instead of being alive. 

He clinks his glass to Rin’s, a quiet nod to the regrets. “To your Archer.”

Rin’s eyes are dry, but her smile is bitter. “To your Rider, then.”

An Archer Waver doesn’t know, and a Rider Rin doesn’t know. Only them, acknowledging the regrets both of them hold, and the seemingly pyrrhic victory they had over them.

**——-o0o——-**

**Author's Note:**

> If you like my writing, please check my twitter @isuilde!


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